Advertising Guru Was Real A Mad Men

In the early years of the advertising agency he had set up in New York in 1948, David Ogilvy affected a full-length flowing black cape with a scarlet lining. A young employee thought he looked like Heathcliff coming off the moors. Ogilvy wore woolly tweed suits (with lapels on his waistcoats) and bow ties, which were replaced in later years by a scarlet-lined, dark blue, double-breasted blazer and traditional striped tie, held in place by, of all things, a Bulldog paper clip. Wavy, flaming-red hair, aristocratic features and twinkling blue eyes completed his look.

To top it off, Ogilvy had the speech of an English gentleman. A maid named Bridey Cummings served tea in his office every afternoon. Many photographs show him with a pipe, which seldom left his lips; he also smoked (but seldom bought) cigars and cigarettes.

Ogilvy was strikingly handsome. A friend who knew him as a student at Oxford recalls, “He looked a tiny bit like Rupert Brooke, so he was always running his hands through his forelock and showing his profile to advantage.” Not surprisingly, women were intensely attracted to him. “He was very, very sexy and incredibly charming,” says a former copywriter. Another agrees: “On my second day in the office, David walked in suddenly. I was struck dumb. It was as though a movie star was in my little office. I almost asked him for his autograph.” Like other large personalities, Ogilvy would have stood out in almost any line of work he chose to pursue. In advertising, he found a field that rapidly embraced his personality at a time business historians would later call its golden age.

To understand the man, one has to understand first that he was an actor, delivering centre-stage points with theatrical flourish. Often dressed for the part, he might show up at black-tie events in a kilt. “Perhaps a bit of self-advertisement,” he explained. “If you can not advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else?”

Instead of coming into a conference hall while the chairman of another agency was speaking, Ogilvy waited until the man had finished and gone, so all eyes would turn to him. A speech consultant considered his showmanship in so little need of improvement that if he came to her for help, she would tell him, go home! Ogilvy was driven around New York in a Rolls-Royce before many were around. It was quite a show.

Ogilvy was not above embellishing his picaresque life story. He famously told the head of British American Tobacco that his first job was with BAT. A few months later, he told another chief executive that his first job had been with that man’s company. It was all part of selling himself. Like any actor, he wanted to give himself better lines.

And like most snobs, Ogilvy loved to name-drop. According to him, one of his friends in Chicago was a former king of Yugoslavia. “If there is anything David likes, it is royalty,” said a friend, “and a king is best.” Yet in business he was democratic. When he entered New York advertising circles, he was shocked to find how separate the Jewish community was from the non-Jewish. “I told our small staff that I wasn’t going to play that game. A lot of our clients were Jewish eg. ( Helena) Rubinstein (in cosmetics) and later Seagram. And our senior executives were also a mixture.” It did not occur to Ogilvy that race or religion should be an issue.

He put a high value on caring for people and practising good manners. “We do not take people to the elevator, we take them down to the street.” When he heard a young writer had lost his parents in a plane crash, he invited the man (whom he did not know) and his wife to his house for dinner. Ogilvy cultivated and flaunted his eccentricities, not all of them attractive. The worst was his appalling behaviour in restaurants, where he often seemed to go out of his way to create a scene. He’d listen to a recitation of the house specialities and order (the breakfast cereal) Grape-Nuts. Or a plate of ketchup or a jar of jelly, as his entire meal. At a pre-Christmas dinner with British clients, he asked for two small mince pies as a starter; for the entree, again two mince pies; instead of dessert, two more mince pies.

A large part of Ogilvy’s success came from the energy he put into getting what he wanted. He would start by mentioning an idea, more or less casually, then follow up with a memo or letter, clips of articles, more memos a tsunami of communications. He never gave up. His ideas gained power from a terse, compact writing style. “I believe in the dogmatism of brevity,” he explained. He registered key thoughts with underscores in memos and letters, verbal emphasis in conversation and speeches. His speeches were riveting; audiences did not talk during them. He could film a talk in a single take.

He collected and repeated aphorisms to make his points. On compensation: “Pay peanuts, and you get monkeys.” On checking expense accounts: “Even the Pope has a confessor.” On leadership: “Search your parks in all your cities / You will find no statues of committees.” Points were made memorable by vivid metaphor. Discussing which of two commercials to show first to a client, Ogilvy told the creative team: “When I was a boy, I always saved the cherry on my pudding for last. Then, one day, my sister stole it. From then on, I always ate the cherry first. Let’s play the best commercial first.” The client liked the first commercial.

Walter Cronkite, who lived next door to Ogilvy in New York, said he could see him working at his desk in the window, night after night, hour after hour. In the morning, letters had been answered, plans outlined, staff memos written. Ogilvy was indefatigable, routinely working until 7pm, then packing his unfinished business into two briefcases to finish at home (which didn’t help his second marriage). Weekends were for more work, not play. “This weekend I went over 375 pieces of paper,” he wrote to his directors. “The Duke of Wellington never went home until he had finished all the work on his desk.”

Most of Ogilvy’s notable ad campaigns were made during a 10-year spurt early in his career. He called them BIG IDEAS (always all capitals). “Unless your advertisement is based on a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night.” His Big Ideas went beyond memorable advertisements. (He dismissed the use of “ads” as not professional and deplored “creativity”, a word he professed not to understand.) His goals were wildly ambitious, nothing less than to change the business and make it more professional. One of his Big Ideas was the now ubiquitous concept of brands.

His greatest legacy may have been an approach that assumed the intelligence of the consumer. “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” “You would not tell lies to your wife. Do not tell them to mine.”

Before he was finished, this immigrant Englishman would improbably rewrite many of the rules of Madison Avenue and become a brand unto himself.